Labor own worst enemy in leader flap

November in Parliament House. A year’s worth of testosterone reaches saturation point in the air-conditioning system. Politicians who like to regard themselves as players talk of the killing season for political leaders.

The relationship between reality and fantasy becomes blurred.

“Only five more question times to go and we can get out of this bloody place," a cabinet minister sighed yesterday.

So how did Labor MPs spend yesterday morning, after a week in which the government achieved a rapid outcome to the
Qantas
dispute and a rare ascendancy over
Tony Abbott
in Parliament?

They spent it dealing with a front-page exclusive in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph.

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But of course they couldn’t help themselves in going on to explain why it was crap, could they?

It was crap, they said, because there would be no move against
Julia Gillard
this year.

That was because there was plenty of time to move next year, was the cheery argument from some.

What are the underlying dynamics at work here?

As discussed in this column a couple of weeks ago, the NSW Right is unhappy with the PM because its brilliant tactical advice on asylum-seeker policy – and one of its ministers – was “rolled" in cabinet.

More venally, NSW MPs are agitated because the clubs industry has told them they won’t get any election funding, which will instead be used to campaign against them.

Of course, the spectre of MPs dumping a prime minister to lock in political donations has just that smack of corruption about it. But we are talking about the NSW Labor Party here.

Either way, the NSW Right seems to have become a little more ambivalent about the Prime Minister.

Having said that, there are plenty of MPs who would still rather eat razor blades than return to the former prime minister.

This navel gazing goes on against a backdrop of gloomy predictions of annihilation, instead of doing anything useful to shore up the government.

Does any of this make a return to Rudd a certainty or amount to a death warrant already signed and sealed? No more than it did a few weeks ago.

In fact, until yesterday, Gillard’s better performance in the past couple of weeks had the whole Rudd nightmare receding.

Her vulnerability between now and the budget next year is that while Labor believes its abysmal polls have bottomed and are on a slow trajectory upwards, the question is whether the recovery – at about a percentage point a month in the primary vote – will be quick enough.

Nobody is counting for Rudd. Some Labor MPs think
Bill Shorten
has been counting, not for Rudd, but to assess the former prime minister’s strength in the face of a possible three-way race.

It’s hard to know how Shorten would actually have time to do all that counting given that wherever you look these days, there he is.

The Assistant Treasurer miraculously turned up on Insiders on Sunday morning to talk about Qantas, and was seen sitting through Fair Work Australia’s marathon hearings. His photo was on the front page of The Australian and he popped up on Lateline.

Busy, busy Bill.

Remembering Gillard at a press conference on Monday, sheet white with exhaustion, you have to respect her dogged attempts to hold a minority government together despite the best efforts of some of the boys around her with hearts the size of a pea.

The second reading of the government’s carbon package went through the Senate yesterday afternoon (36 votes to 32). The final vote is on Tuesday.

In the House of Representatives, the minerals resource rent tax package was being debated.

After its politically disastrous history and cost, it is extraordinary to see it is one of the few things that now seems to give Labor political confidence for the year’s end.

The government believes Tony Abbott has locked himself into an untenable position on this issue.

The Opposition Leader has pledged to repeal the tax and its tax cuts, infrastructure spending and increased superannuation, despite the fact the three companies that will pay the bulk of the tax are locked into a deal with the government on the tax.

The package gives Labor a story to tell about sharing the wealth of the boom, and specific measures to sell it in its heartland.

The political strategy on Qantas did not look quite so pretty.

From outside, it looked like the government just couldn’t resist the temptation to get bogged down in the battle over who knew what and when, muddying a clear win.

Its tactics in doing so were pretty simple. Qantas was the subject of an irate public’s wrath. The government was looking for a way to ride the populist wave.

The cost of that is not insubstantial. It has solidified business opinion against Labor, since the dispute was seen as a spectacular example of the failures of the current regime.

Unfortunately for the business community, the Coalition was missing in action on this issue, and, if anything, backing compulsory arbitration and squibbing on tougher changes to the Fair Work Act.

The upshot is that the political pressures ahead of a looming review of the Fair Work Act are pushing the tussle between an enterprise bargaining model and a more regulated system away from the bargaining system.

You’d have to hope that Gillard doesn’t simply try (once again) to revive Work Choices as a bogyman for the next election.

But the events of this week give Labor every reason to fashion an aggressive election strategy on industrial relations in the belief it is unlikely to face a serious challenge from the Coalition.